The fail whale is like my cat when she throws up on the carpet. At first, I notice that my fuzzy carpet has been replaced with a cold and mushy puddle of vomit. Then, I’ll usually notice the culprit being completely adorable over in the corner, pretending that it didn’t happen.
The absolutely wonderful graphic of the whale hides the fact that I can’t find the information I want and connect with the people I want to. It’s a chilly puddle of puke, telling me to “Please wait a moment and try again.” But what is a moment? 30 seconds? 5 minutes? An hour? Sure, I can go check the Twitter status page, but that isn’t made obvious from the Fail Whale, and even then it usually doesn’t give a clear idea of when the service will be back.
There is no reason we should still have a fail whale. If Twitter wants to keep and attracting users, they need a stable platform. People and Businesses need reliability. People will migrate to other services if they aren’t guaranteed a reliable and consistent experience.
To contrast Twitter’s stability issues, I present Facebook. Facebook has 400 million users who upload text, photos, and videos, every minute of every day. I can’t think of a moment when Facebook has gone down in the six years I’ve used it. A Google search for “Facebook Down” brought one instance up, and the rest of the results were varied. Meanwhile, searching “Twitter Down” brings up a host of utilities to see if Twitter is working at the moment.
I realize Twitter serves millions of people all around the globe for free, but we deserve a platform that doesn’t crap out and try cover it up with cuteness.
Anti-Social Media